Essays, opinion and thought on poetry. Based in the English Department of King's College London

Three poems by Richard Skinner

Below are three poems from Richard Skinner’s new pamphlet The Malvern Aviator, recently published by Smokestack Books.

Dark Nook

I am Egbert Clague.
I come every morning from Agneash
hoping for the nod from the bargain man.
It takes two hours to descend the ladders,
our tallow candles round our necks
like white asparagus.

The hole to go down is just two foot by two,
the spokes like blunt knives,
the blackdamp smelling awful. We chip
and hack until we see the sparkle
of the rich extraordinary,
haul it up through smoke to the adit.

One day, they brought me up
in the dead box, my leg crushed.
The Captain of the Mines
came in person to the cottage and said,
‘We can’t give you anything
and that will have to keep you.’

My wife Brenda is on the
Washing Floors now, sorting ore from stone
ready to ship to Swansea.
It’s worse work than the mine —
she has no more feeling in her hands.
I’ll be joining her there soon.

Meantime, I grow veg, read and
visit the village chapel on my sticks
to pray our Sooki will one day flee.
When I’m alone, I kneel and whisper,
‘The affection you get back from children
is sixpence as change from a sovereign.’

Via Fiori Oscuri

(Milan, 1st May 2015)

Flashes of cornices in puddles.
Street cleaners on tractor quads
that expel angry air from flues.

Pale striped awnings buffer on balconies,
a radio blares from a kiosk.
The Pinacoteca is closed.

A purple billboard announces
reticulated giraffes in the new zoo,
a recurrence of atavistic beasts.

Two cars smoulder near Bar Magenta,
anti-Expo graffiti on metal shutters,
the air perfumed with violence.

About Richard Skinner

Richard Skinner is a writer working across fiction, life writing, essays, non-fiction and poetry. He has published three novels with Faber & Faber and three books of non-fiction. His poetry first appeared in the Faber anthology First Pressings (1998) and since then in anthologies for William Blake, John Berger and Médicines Sans Frontières. He has published three books of poems with Smokestack: ‘the light user scheme’ (2013), ‘Terrace’ (2015), and ‘The Malvern Aviator’ (2018). Richard is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy.